Does anyone out there have a copy? Can you send me the recipe for John the Baptist Bread? I’m supposed to be doing a 4-H workshop this weekend, and can’t find the recipe online. Help!

All I remember is that you roast crickets (since locusts are hard to come by in Michigan), grind them into flour (a coffee grinder is excellent for this, but you will find the odd tarsi in your beans later on), and mix it with lots of honey to make a very nice little cake.

The name of the bread comes from a passage in Mark 1.6: “And John was dressed with the hairs of a camel and with a belt of skins around his loins, and he ate locusts and wild honey.”

What, exactly, John the Baptist really ate is a subject of a lot more scholarly study than I had imagined. There is what appears to be a review on the topic here; also a LONG pamphlet called “The Diet of John the Baptist” online at Google Books, and much more if you care to use your Google-Fu.

Some authors take a rather entomophobic approach that it was the locust tree, not actual locusts, that were eaten. However, this ignores the long tradition of eating locusts in Africa.

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